France orders extra border checks with Spain amid Ceuta migrant crisis

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PARIS — French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez announced Friday that he had ordered increased controls at the border with Spain over fears that the thousands of migrants who reportedly forced their way into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta could travel unimpeded throughout the Schengen area.

Nuñez announced in a post on X that local police and military units would be mobilized for the checks, and said in an interview with radio station RTL that he was in contact with Spanish authorities.

“We have a mobile unit that is on duty around the clock,” he said on RTL.

Nuñez’s office did not immediately provide additional details on where the increased controls would take place.

France is part of the Schengen area but has repeatedly renewed its authorization to proceed with temporary internal border checks since the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, using provisions in the Schengen Borders Code that allow such measures in response to serious security threats.

But the images of people pouring into Ceuta, an autonomous city of about 80,000 people and one of the European Union’s only two land borders with Africa, have drawn scrutiny far beyond Paris — especially among right-wing and far-right parties across Europe who seized on the incident to call for heightened restrictions on migration.

“The images coming from Ceuta are shocking and demonstrate, once again, that uncontrolled illegal immigration poses a real threat to the security of Europe’s borders,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni wrote on X .

Javí Lopez, the vice-president of the European Parliament and a member of the Socialists and Democrats, called Meloni’s comments “unworthy of a European partner.”

“After 700,000+ arrivals from Libya, Italy received European support, not lectures. Solidarity is not a one-way street,” Lopez said.

Before Nuñez’s announcement, Marine Le Pen, the leading far-right candidate ahead of next year’s presidential election in France, urged the government to “step up border controls” and vowed to “limit Schengen free movement to EU nationals” if elected president next year.

Conservative presidential candidate Bruno Retailleau said it was “more than ever necessary” to “ostracize Spain from the European community,” and that the “irresponsible socialist government” led by center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had made the passport-free travel area “untenable.”

Retailleau, who preceded Nuñez as interior minister, said Sánchez had sparked the situation in Ceuta by granting legal status to half a million unauthorized immigrants in April . The reasons behind the influx in Ceuta, however, are not yet clear.

On Thursday, Sánchez said the “government of Spain is fully committed to providing an immediate response to the situation in Ceuta … and preparing the necessary measures to restore normalcy as soon as possible.”

The Spanish government has deployed military units to Ceuta and Sánchez is set to visit Friday.